SSA hired <100 employees in all of 2025 — the lowest ever, and less than 2% of average annual hiring. As a result, some offices have been so short-staffed, they were forced to close their doors to people seeking service, sometimes for hours & sometimes for weeks. www.cbpp.org/research/soc...

STRIDER CAPCOM 1990 SEGA GENESIS

OPINION: "Most pregnant women in the United States aren’t meeting dietary recommendations. This is especially true for women living in rural communities," Bethany Barone Gibbs and Alex Crisp write.

As a point of comparison, the US spent $21 billion in FY 2022 to feed billions of breakfasts and lunches to kids in schools across our whole country for an entire year under the universal school meals program that was later discontinued.

PAPERBOY EASTRIDGE/ATARI 1991 FAMICOM

Because housing assistance is drastically underfunded, only 1 in 4 eligible low-income households receive it. Providing it to all who qualify would cost $118 billion a year—a tiny fraction of the proposed $1.5 *trillion* defense budget for 2027. Poverty would fall 13% overall and 23% for children.

H.R. 1 slashed federal funding for SNAP & imposed those costs on states as a massive unfunded mandate. A reminder of what's at stake as the House Agriculture Committee debates an amendment to delay this cost shift: CBO says these costs could drive states to end SNAP altogether.

Restarting tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is not going to be quick even with US military escorts and government insurance schemes, experts tell the FT www.ft.com/content/e006...

In his book,”Tattoos on the Heart,” Fr. Gregory Boyle advocates for a “compassion that can stand in awe of what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” I thought about that a lot as I read & reread this astounding book by @brian-goldstone.bsky.social

My statement on President Trump’s combat operations in Iran⬇️

Franzi Schimmer captured this Grizzly bear in Brooks Falls, Alaska just floating along, tippy-tapping down the river, browsing the salmon. Prior to hibernation, up to 40% of a bear's body mass is fat, which is less dense than water (~0.9 g/cm^2), so the murder-monster is also a floaty-boaty.

I don't think it's widely understood how many people in their 50s are going to lose health coverage because of the new Medicaid work rules at a time in their lives when their medical needs are likely to increase.

FDA refuses to review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine arstechnica.com/health/2026/...

NEW: Roughly 5,000 North Carolina homeowners affected by Hurricane Helene are awaiting help from the state. But records show problems like rigid rules and insufficient staffing, which occurred in a previous rebuilding program, are starting to surface.

Just a few weeks ago, the administration cancelled all remaining department of energy grid resilience projects in Puerto Rico. All of them. www.latitudemedia.com/news/the-end...

If anyone wants to know more about Puerto Rico and the other US territories/colonies, I will also recommend this book! (If I may...)

"A 2-year-old boy was breastfeeding in detention. One 6-year-old boy had leukemia. An 8-year-old girl began wetting the bed. A 14-year-old girl engaged in self-harm...None of these children or their parents had a criminal history anywhere in the world." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/01/o...

Greetings from inside the economic blockade zones of Minneapolis and St Paul! Don’t look away, please. We need you. It’s been a month and they’re trying to destroy us.

Minneapolis has seen a stunning 1,646% spike in calls from families who can't pay rent because they're afraid to leave their homes to work. This is state violence manufacturing housing precarity in real time. People should not be facing eviction when their city is under occupation.

The US Holocaust Museum being more outraged by Tim Walz saying that, like Anne Frank, children today are in hiding from armed agents of the state, than they are about the fact that children are in hiding from armed agents of the state, is why Holocaust remembrance culture is in crisis.

‘The state has moved from telling us what we cannot teach to telling us exactly what we can…giving our students a really impoverished version of the discipline,’ Katie Rainwater ‘[Students] will be getting a sociology text, a sociology course without a soul…It is a sanitized version,’ Matt Marr

Better base pay and mandated scheduling protections are, indeed, very good ideas for making sure that everyone who's working a full time job can go to a home they can afford when their shift is over, and eat a meal without worrying about if they'll be able to pay their power bill.

Delivered (thanks dad) $250 of notebooks, sketchbooks, pens, pencils for Roosevelt High School students this week ~ thanks to contributors and @wetpaintart.bsky.social Another way to support Minneapolis arts through the printshops below.

With racism, there are a lot of times when you also have to use hedged language. Dog whistles tend to be suggestions and need to be covered as such. However, what Trump is getting into with Somalis is blatantly and objectively racist.

This is just so far from what anyone should want for our country.

I recently met a widowed 71-year-old woman still working two jobs and living at an extended-stay hotel because even two jobs don't pay her enough to afford rent. This is what "one more year of work" looks like in America.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

Clean Slate Campaign for adult records (I was not a coalition member) info at link! (context for a comment in the video: crim records *cannot exclude people from voting* in IL but may prevent them from holding elected/appointed office) FAQ has details on timeline, etc. www.cleanslateillinois.org

USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, the federal agency that oversees programs like SNAP, WIC, and school meals, has apparently lost one-third of its staff in the last year.

I need to take the rest of the night off. The messages in my inbox today, from people desperately begging me for help bc they've learned that with 1/1/26 they've lost Medicaid or ACA coverage that keeps them or their kids alive... and there's nothing at all I can do for them. My writeup of CDC vax

No one should be hungry. No one should be experiencing lifelong physical and psychological echoes of hunger.

As a Jew, it’s fun watching the administration post Christian nationalist messages while also saying they are doing everything they can to curb antisemitism.

Regular reminder there is no such thing as unskilled labour🫜🫜🫜

Hello network. This is real shit. I’m looking for transgender, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming front and back end web designers for a project to help trans people get housing in NJ. This is a paid opportunity. Please share this if you see it, and my DMs are open for more information. Tysm 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵

Penalizing poor families for having a car or having minimal savings is pretty bad policy.

This is correct! Researchers find that a) most people underestimate the administrative burdens of immigration, and b) when informed about these burdens become more supportive of immigration. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Excellent explanation of the chaotic mess that people trying to scrape a meal together are wading through due to USDA's conflicting and inconsistent guidance. The Administration needs to release full SNAP funding immediately.

It is illegal to not follow a court order and it is just wrong to delay food assistance to children, seniors, veterans, working parents, and people with disabilities.

Ask any of your favorite Black women writers from a decade ago why their bylines stopped appearing, and you’ll likely hear the same response: There is no place for us in media. In TV. In publishing or academia. For the majority of us, there’s no place but gone.

I just don’t think we’re freaking out enough about this SNAP cut. I have spent my whole career working with people who rely on SNAP for food. People who work multiple jobs. Who have kids. What do you think happens when 1/8th of the population can’t buy food anymore? Everything is going to collapse.

NEW: The Trump admin just ended the practice of automatically extending work permits when people file to renew them — meaning that if USCIS takes too long to process a renewal the applicant loses their authorization to work legally. The interim final rule applies to renewals filed after tomorrow.

Today was a hard day. Regulations that we passed unanimously last year, after 7 years of advocacy, were largely gutted. The FCC capitulated to the correctional telecom industry in roughly doubling rate caps for prison and jail calls. I'm truly sorry. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/u...

If you are able to, please contribute to your local food bank this week

41 MILLION people are facing a Thanksgiving month without money for food, while contingency funding for SNAP benefits sits unused. Just a month ago, OMB said that SNAP's contingency fund should fund benefits in a shutdown. Now, new reporting says the White House has changed their minds.

With millions at risk of losing SNAP in the coming days, a reminder: hunger doesn't happen in isolation. When food assistance disappears, families use rent money to eat. Then come evictions and homelessness. Housing, food, healthcare—it's all connected. Cut one thread and the whole thing unravels.

Brooke Rollins is running around saying SNAP will run out of money November 1 when the administration could release emergency funds to cover two-thirds of the cost www.cbpp.org/blog/the-tru...

These are real people facing real consequences if Congress doesn’t act to extend the enhancements ASAP. M.M., an IT consultant, would be forced to cut back on groceries and medications like insulin to treat their diabetes. (3/4)

This is good reporting on the disaster in Alaska if you're looking for a reliable summary. This is a bigger disaster than I think most are realizing. 1500 people have been displaced by the flooding with an exceptionally complicated response and recovery. www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5kz...

Part of what’s happened is that as (neoliberalism, if you prefer) our political theory of governance starves one part of the social safety net, people flee to the other parts. Disability claims is, for a lot of people, an onerous, right to get last stop on a train heading for a brick wall.

REMINDER: Mike Johnson's district has ~40,000 #ACA market enrollees. A single parent earning $40K/yr could see their net premiums more than TRIPLE. acasignups.net/ira-subsidy-...